JoshSweeney

Losing Your Number One Source Of

I recently read an article from one of my favorite local professional bloggers that wrote about diversifying income streams. In the article he posed a very important question which was “If my #1 source of income was gone tomorrow…. what would I have left?”

This struck me as a pretty powerful thought and exercise. If my #1 ___________ was gone tomorrow…….. what would I have left? The next question is, what would I do? Planning for disaster isn’t a fun task and takes a lot of deep thought. Unfortunately this type of planning and exercise doesn’t happen enough in businesses.

Here are a few questions that I asked myself:

What if my top engineer left tomorrow?

What if my top top salesperson left?

What if my #1 business revenue stream was somehow cut off?

What if my best strategic partner went out of business?

Have you asked yourself these questions lately?

These loses could be devastating to many businesses. In fact, there was a time when this would have been totally catastrophic to my own business.

Yes, now it would be a huge blow to lose some of my key people. We are somewhat of a family and we work well together, but that does not mean that I am blind to the fact that they are talented and someday they may choose to move on. This is reality in today’s business world.

The one thing I and many successful business people I know do to lighten the blow when this does happen, is to always look for new talent.

Building relationships with quality people in all avenues of your business will allow you a pool of people to pick from when a position does open up. It is much easier to ask somebody you know, and know their work, to come work for you than to hope the right person comes your way after a position opens. Networking is the key to keeping the candidate pool full at all times.

Obviously you don’t want to live your life or run your business based on fear but you should be asking yourself the hard questions and planning accordingly.